Advisory Memo To Journalists

We became aware on June 7, that news media
received a memo from John Gehring, casting aspersions on the Catholic bishops
and their educational project on religious liberty, the Fortnight for Freedom.

Mr. Gehring is Catholic
Program Director of “Faith
in Public Life,” a group founded with help from a pro-abortion group long
directed by John Podesta called the Center for American
Progress (CAP); like the CAP it has
received funding
from billionaire atheist George
Soros. These do not seem like eminent qualifications for telling bishops
how to guide the Church.

In his memo, Mr.
Gehring juxtaposes what he calls the bishops’ “Fictions” with his “Facts” – and
he provides the media with “questions to ask Catholic bishops” that he
apparently thinks are embarrassing.In
fact we’re happy to answer those questions in this memo.But we’ll begin by showing how fiction and
fact is mixed up in his account.

Gehring:
It’s especially important to scrutinize the bishops’ campaign because of “the
charged political backdrop of this high-profile initiative -- five months
before a presidential election.”

Fact:
Mr. Gehring should have noticed that the bishops’ key insert for Church
bulletins during the Fortnight for Freedom lists seven
recent threats to religious liberty – only two of which have anything to
do
with the President or his administration.None of our materials, of
course, say anything about an election.The Fortnight for Freedom
responds to a broader
trend in our society: We are in danger of forgetting our nation’s great
legacy
of religious freedom, and of neglecting to defend such freedom for
everyone when
that is most needed.Even regarding the
HHS contraceptive mandate – the only one of the seven threats that Mr.
Gehring
seems to notice – the timing of the regulatory process and resulting
controversy has been determined by the Administration, not by the
Church.

Gehring:
The bishops have accused the Administration of waging “a war on religion” and
“a war on the Catholic Church.”

Fact:
Though
he puts these phrases in direct quotes,Gehring
produces noevidence of this. Instead
he pulls a bait-and-switch, citing (and misusing) other quotes.For example:

Gehring accuses
Cardinal Dolan of saying that the Administration is “‘strangling’ the Catholic
Church.”What Cardinal Dolan said was:
“The exemption given to the church [by the HHS mandate] is so
strangling and so narrow and it’s also presumptuous that a bureau of the
federal government is attempting to define for the church the extent of its
ministry and ministers… It’s almost like we’re being punished for the fact that
we serve a lot of people.” The Cardinal was noting that the narrow religious
exemption is “strangling” the Church’s ability to live out its mission, because
a Church institution can’t be exempt from the morally objectionable coverage
unless (among other things) it stops serving people of other faiths – thus it
must violate one call of the gospel or the other.To point out this Hobson’s choice is simply
to recognize reality.

Gehring says Bishop
Jenky of Peoria has “compared Obama administration policies to those of Hitler and
Stalin.”Actually Bishop Jenky expressed
concern
that the federal government may have begun to distrust the churches as rivals
to its own claims to authority – as happened with many European leaders of the
past century and more, whether of the mainstream right and left (Otto von
Bismarck and Georges Clemenceau) or of the extremist right and left (Adolf
Hitler and Joseph Stalin).But then, “Bishop
warns against government trend toward a century-old European view of religion that,
for all their other vast differences, was shared by Hitler and Georges
Clemenceau” would not make a racy headline.

Finally, Gehring says
Bishop Cordileone has expressed worry about the “despotism” of the HHS
mandate.Bishop Cordileone was citing
an 1886 speech by Cardinal James Gibbons that said the U.S. has “liberty
without license, authority without despotism.” Noting recent attacks on the
conscience rights of individual Americans, and on the right of religious
institutions to serve the public without violating their teaching on marriage,
he worried that “we could be starting to
move in the direction of license and despotism.”In this context the bishop did not mention the
HHS mandate or the Administration -- and the conference at which he spoke distributed
a list of ten recent threats to religious freedom, only three of which have
anything to do with the Obama administration. Yet Gehring simply assumes that
all this is a direct reference (and an overreaction) to one federal policy.

Gehring:
The Obama administration has now provided a “wider religious exemption” to its
contraceptive mandate, and the bishops initially welcomed this before “quickly
moving the goalposts” so they could object to it and support the Blunt
amendment in Congress.

Fact:
There was no “moving of goalposts.”The
bishops have voiced principled objection
to coerced contraceptive coverage as part of HHS’s “preventive services”
mandate since 2010; they have supported exemptions from such mandates on moral
or religious grounds for many years; and they have supported the “Respect
for Rights of Conscience Act” (identical with the Blunt amendment) since
December 2010.What happened on February
10, 2012 was that the bishops initially welcomed the Administration’s
announcement that its incredibly narrow religious exemption would be broadened;
but before the end of the day they saw the actual “final rule” from HHS, and
found that the mandate and narrow exemption had been finalized “without
change.”So “spin” gave way to grim reality.A widening of the exemption not only did not happen – it would actually now be illegal, unless a new rulemaking process
were to nullify the current one.

Gehring:
The
“accommodation” to which the bishops object
“makes sure no religiously affiliated institution will have to pay for
services that violate its moral beliefs or even refer employees for this
coverage,” and so has been welcomed by Catholic Health Association and other
Catholic groups.

Fact:
No, the Catholic Health Association has objected
to the proposed “accommodation,” as have others across the political spectrum, once
they found that the coverage will ultimately be subsidized by premiums paid by
employers and employees and that the Administration’s various proposals are
unworkable.Religious employers are excluded
from having to “provide” the coverage only in the sense that the decision about providing it to their own
employees will be taken away from them by the government.And Gehring’s claim that the coverage will be
provided only “if a woman employed by an objecting Catholic institution wants
this coverage” is absolutely false: The Administration’s new notice says the
coverage will be provided “automatically” to these women, and to their teenage
children, even if the woman objects.So
individual conscience rights as well as parents’ rights to guide their children
in matters of sexuality are now also at risk.Gehring doesn’t notice that in this respect, the new advance notice
promotes a more coercive policy than
the original one he describes (which is now obsolete).The problems with the “accommodation” have
been thoroughly explained in a recent comment
letter and fact
sheet from the USCCB.

Gehring:
Covering contraception is nothing new for Catholic institutions because it is
already required in 28 states.

Fact:
This canard was thoroughly addressed in the USCCB’s August 2011 comment
letter to HHS.The state mandates
usually apply only to health plans that provide prescription drug coverage
generally; only one state requires coverage of sterilization; the mandates can
be side-stepped by self-insuring, or coming under federal ERISA standards; and
only three states have a religious exemption as incredibly narrow as the HHS
mandate.The federal government has the
most inescapably draconian mandate and the narrowest religious exemption in the
country.No, this is not “business as
usual.”

Gehring:
Most Americans and Catholics support the HHS mandate and reject the Church’s
concerns.

Fact:
The findings of public opinion polls are notoriously changeable and dependent
on the wording of questions, but in fact many polls contradict Gehring’s claim.Majority or plurality opposition to the
mandate and/or its application to religious institutions, among Catholics and
the general public, has been seen in polls released between February and June by
Rasmussen,
CNN,
Gallup,
QEV Analytics,
CBS
News/New York Times, and Marist.In any case, our entire history of religious
freedom in the United States has been aimed at defending the consciences of
minorities against coercion by majorities.

Gehring’s
Proposed Questions for Bishops

Now for the questions
Mr. Gehring wants news media to ask of the bishops.

“Catholic organizations
have received significant funding increases under the Obama administration.
Doesn't this undercut your claims that the administration is ''strangling” the
Catholic Church?”

We didn’t quite say
that (see above).But we note that the
claimed funding increases are for Fiscal Years 2010 and 2011.The restrictive requirements that tend to
exclude Catholic organizations from domestic and foreign service grants did not
appear in federal grant documents until mid-2011,
so 2012 would be the first year that is even relevant.In any case, the government grants are not
gifts that signify how much the government likes the Catholic Church.Nor are they payments in exchange for our
silence when our religious freedom is attacked elsewhere.Instead, they are payments in exchange for
the delivery of human services, without profit.They are a sign only of the fact that the Church delivers human services
more effectively and efficiently than others participating in a competitive
process.

“How much money is being spent on this
religious liberty campaign and where is it coming from?”

This cannot be answered nationally because each diocese chooses its own
activities and funding. But Gehring’s focus here is to discredit the national
funding received from the Knights of Columbus, which has devoted many hundreds
of millions of dollars to nonpartisan life-saving humanitarian goals, because
that group’s current leader worked for a Republican president 25 years ago.This is an unwise objection for Faith in
Public Life to raise, since its own staff of seven people
includes: one person who came to the group directly from serving as
communications director for a Democratic congressman and his election campaign;
one who worked for various Democratic campaigns and for the Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee; two
(including Gehring) who worked for Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a
blatantly partisan Soros-funded political initiative; and an executive director
coming from the secular and partisan Center for American Progress.People in glass houses shouldn’t throw boomerangs.

“In all of your religious liberty materials
why is there no mention that it was a conservative Catholic, Supreme Court
Justice Anton in Scalia, who wrote a major decision weakening religious liberty
protections?”

As a start: (a) We don’t tag Supreme Court justices with religious and
political labels to discredit them, (b) this decision in Employment Division
v. Smith happened 22 years ago, and (c) we already have spent many
years of litigation and legislative advocacy to counter its effects, with some
success.Among other things, we helped
enact the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 to restore federal
protection of religion to the status it had before the Smith decision –
and it is most likely under that law that the HHS mandate will be invalidated by federal courts.

“Are you concerned
that this religious liberty campaign is in danger of becoming politicized
during an election year? Bishop Stephen Blaire, chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee
on Domestic Justice and Human Development, recently expressed concern that some
groups ‘very far to the right’ are trying to use the conflict as ‘an anti-Obama
campaign’."

Partisan misuse of such
legitimate issues by other groups is indeed a concern, whether those others come
from the right (as Bishop Blaire has properly warned) or from the left (as Mr.
Gehring has exemplified).The solution
is for the bishops to resist the distractions of those others and stay focused
on the merits of the substantive issue, emphasizing the Fortnight for Freedom
as a time for education, prayer, and action on the great gift of religious
liberty.

“Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the president of the U.S. bishops' conference
has argued there is now ‘a drive to neuter religion,’ but aren't your
objections to the Obama administration disputes over policy issues not a
culture war clash between Church and State?”

No.A dispute over whether existing government
funding of contraception should be increased would be an example of a “dispute
over policy issues.”But a dispute over
whether the government will force
religious employers to fund and facilitate contraception, even when they object
to it in conscience, is a religious freedom dispute.Mr. Gehring simply ignores the element of
government coercion, as do so many others who attempt to diminish the religious
freedom aspect.In any event, the trend
Cardinal Dolan describes goes well beyond the HHS mandate, or even this
Administration.It also involves actions
by state legislative and executive bodies, some courts, and powerful interest
groups.

For example, the
Administration has excluded the Catholic Church’s efforts to serve victims of
human trafficking from federal support because of the Church’s religious and
moral conviction not to promote abortion.Adding insult to injury, ACLU claims that such religious discrimination
is not only permitted, but required, by the First Amendment—and a trial court
recently agreed (and is being appealed).Similarly, the Administration has taken the position that the First
Amendment affords no special protection for the hiring of ministers by religious
organizations.Fortunately, this view
was rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court as “remarkable” and “untenable.” At the state level, some states would
criminalize ministry to undocumented immigrants as forbidden “harboring.”At the local level, religious groups are
denied equal access to public facilities, which comparable secular groups could
obtain without difficulty.No, something
new and troubling has been happening, and to ignore that is to bury one’s head
in the sand—or worse, to try to protect from criticism those who are fostering
the trend.

“Are you willing to sacrifice Catholic charities, colleges and hospitals
if you don't get your way on the contraceptive mandate?”

We will keep fighting
until we prevail.And if, in the
meantime, any Church institutions are ever “sacrificed,” it will be the result
of government action making it impossible for those Church institutions to
continue to operate consistent with their religious beliefs.

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